Sunday, November 27, 2011

The Mets in Petco



Much has been said about the Citi Field, it's large dimensions and how that has factored into the teams failures in the late aughts, spefically how it has hurt the power numbers of sluggers like Jason Bay and David Wright. I generally agree with this premise but I sometimes worry that we use Citi Field as too easy a crutch too explain away problems with the Mets performance so from time to time I think it's useful to run little expirements and see what happens. All of these thought expirements are not scientific and generally have variables that could poke holes in the outcome, but I still think they can be telling and help to look at the team in different ways.

I looked at this issue of Citi Field and power numbers once before. Today I want to look at how the Mets hit in another pitchers park. Petco Park, home of the San Diego Super Padres. Petco Park is widely considered to be the ultimate pitchers park, the ying to the offensive yang of Coors Field. Below is a basic comparison of the two parks (distances measured in feet) :


Park
Left
Right
Center
Citi
335
330
408
Petco
367
382
396

As you can see Petco is significantly longer in left and right and shorter by a smaller margin in center field.

The Mets played three games (August 15-17) in Petco this year and went 2-1. Overall they hit average. They collected 23 hits, 3 homeruns and 2 doubles taking 34 Total Bases. The Mets averaged 9.1 runs per game and .66 homers per game. In three games series they fell below their per game average twice scoring 7, 4 and 12 respectively and they exceeded their homerun average twice, hitting 1, 0 and 3 respectively. This would generally indicate that hitting in a different pitchers park didn't make the Mets significantly better or worse than hitting in their home pitchers park.

We should also look at the two players who stats are most often said to be affected by Citi Field, D Wright and Jason Bay.


Player
Game 1
Game 2
Game 3
Wright
1/4
1/3
1/5
Bay
0/4
0/4
0/4

Bay was predictably awful here. This was smack in the middle of one his trademark long slumps. Wright was pretty weak also but he did manage a double and hit one of his 14 home runs here. So what does this prove? I guess it just makes me happy we don't play in Petco all that often.

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